This delicious confection of a musical banishes the cares of the world with sublime songs and dynamic tap routines. A Gershwin-scored boy-meets-girl story and a love letter to old-school American showbiz, it’s fronted with brio by boyish, buoyant Charlie Stemp as Bobby Child, the Depression-era banking heir who dreams of being a Broadway hoofer.
Susan Stroman created a new dance vocabulary for the first production in 1992 and directs and choreographs this revival, which started at Chichester Festival Theatre last year and arrives in the West End with razzle-dazzle to spare. It’s a joy: just don’t squint at the plot too hard.
The show is a do-over of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1930 film musical Girl Crazy, for which writer Ken Ludwig fashioned a new narrative. Bobby is sent by his bossy ma (and pursued by his importunate fiancée Irene) to defunct Nevada mining town Deadrock to foreclose on its theatre. Instead, he falls in love with the owner’s daughter Polly (Carly Anderson) and decides to win her heart – and save the town – by impersonating Hungarian impresario Bela Zangler and putting on his own version of the Ziegfield Follies.
The cuckoo economics of this plan drew bleak titters from the theatre folk in the audience on opening night. Credibility is further stretched as Bobby and Polly are manoeuvred into endless inventive dance routines and the real Zangler (Tom Edden) inevitably turns up.
Ludwig augments great songs from the original – including Embraceable You and I Got Rhythm – with bangers culled from other parts of the Gershwin brothers’ back catalogue. Sometimes the plot is bent to fit them. Natalie Kassanga’s Irene is kept hanging around purely so she can deliver a breathy, fruity version of Naughty Baby; she does it beautifully, mind.
But the genius of Ludwig, Stroman and original director Mike Ockrent was to infuse this rickety structure with the wisecracking dialogue and heedless, who-cares-if-it-makes-sense energy of much American interwar entertainment. So we don’t just get dazzling New York showgirl costumes and parodies of Western saloon bar fights, but the sort of sly dialogue that existed before the Hays Code censored Hollywood in 1934.
Bobby looks at Polly “like a cow who needs milking”. Told that Polly is the only girl in Deadrock, Irene remarks: “I guess that’s why she looks so tired.” There’s physical comedy reminiscent of Bugs Bunny or Tex Avery cartoons. The scene where the real and fake Zengler mirror each other, both drunk and despondent, is pure Marx Brothers.
It wouldn’t work without the complete conviction of the cast, who bring equal sincerity to corny lines and to exquisite dance routines that rope in pickaxes and prospecting pans. The sketchiness of Beowulf Borrit’s set becomes a virtue, the cast pulling off corrugated iron panels to tapdance on or forming themselves into Ziegfield-esque constructions. Edden delivers an outrageous comic turn as Zangler. Anderson has a bright, bold voice and plenty of sass.
Most importantly, she and Stemp seem to defy gravity when they dance. The show has a delirious weightlessness: for 150 minutes, you’re lifted out of care, and logic. How fitting that it’s in the first major London theatre to be named after a choreographer. Broadway hits don’t always translate to London but this show does the business.
